Maryland’s casinos generated more than $608.3 million in total revenue last year—$76.8 million more than projected—including $284.3 million paid by law to the education trust fund to support early childhood, elementary, and secondary education and fund school construction and capital improvement projects, the Baltimore Sun reports.
During the fiscal year that ended June 30, the paper reported lottery sales fell 2.2 percent to $545 million, compared to $565 million last year.
“We fully expected the lottery number to drop given the increased access for our consumers to casinos,” the Sun quoted the director of the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency, Stephen Martino, as saying. “It’s our job to get the lottery numbers back up, certainly.”
“However, the good news is clear,” he added, according to the Associated Press. “When combining traditional lottery and casino gaming revenue, there is a significant increase from the previous fiscal year in the amount of money generated for the state.”
Maryland currently offers people a choice of four casinos, all with slot machines and either live or electronic table games:
- Rocky Gap Casino Resort, Flintstone (Allegany County)
- Hollywood Casino Perryville, Perryville (Cecil County)
- Ocean Downs, Berlin (Worcester County), table games are electronic
- Maryland Live!, Hanover (Anne Arundel County), which generated most of the revenue increase
Two of the state’s larger casinos have yet to be built, the Associated Press reports. A Harrah’s in Baltimore near M&T Bank Stadium and Oriole Park at Camden Yards is set to open in mid-2014. A sixth casino in Prince George’s County was approved by voters but is still in the licensing process. Three companies have submitted plans for that casino: MGM Resorts International, Penn National Gaming Inc, and Greenwood Racing Inc. The licensing is expected to finish by the end of the year, leading to a possible opening in the summer of 2016.
Aside from the money that went to the education trust fund by law, some of the money was used to pad horse racing purses, to upgrade horse racing tracks, to fund operating costs for the state lottery, and for minority- and women-owned businesses.
Editorial
We were against the development of casinos when the government of Maryland came up with the plan a few years ago. But the state needed money. It’s not so much that people don’t enjoy the games or that most people can’t control their gambling. It’s simply that casinos tend to promote certain fallacies about probability that seem, to me, unethical, as they take advantage of people whose education level isn’t high enough to understand why the house always wins.
For example, there are four possible royal flushes in five-card poker, one for each suit. Given the number of hands possible in a five-card game, your odds of drawing a royal flush are 649,739:1. If you play two hands, your odds double over all, but you’re still only playing one hand at a time. Even if you argue the odds double, they go from 0.00015 percent (less than two ten-thousandths of a percent) to 0.00031 percent (about three ten-thousandths of a percent). So, even if you play 5,000 hands, your combined probability of drawing a royal flush in even one of them would still be less than 1 percent.
You would actually have to play thousands of hands before your chances of drawing a royal flush go up appreciably, as Dr Math explains, here.
I’m not a gambler, and I don’t understand the fascination with it. My recommendation, if you go to the casinos, would be:
- Set a limit and stop when you run out (keep winnings away from your bankroll)
- Quit when you’re ahead (or the first time a little voice tells you you should)